My Heart is Africa. Scott Griffin

any plane, no matter where it came down; no pilot’s carelessness had yet defeated them. Jim, of course, would fly the plane once Colin had jury-rigged the wreckage back into some kind of flying shape. The wall of Colin’s office was covered with photographs of rescued aircraft that had been hauled out of the jungle by Land Rover or winched out of a sand dune. There was even one that had been transported over water by a raft of dugout canoes.

      Jim relied heavily on his chief pilot, Benoit Wangermez, who was professional and demanding of the pilots reporting to him. Benoit was an enigma to most people in the Flying Doctors Service. No one really knew much about his background except that he had been in the French Foreign Legion and had spent time in North and West Africa. A man of few words, he refused to talk about his past, which only added mystique to his appearance in Nairobi in 1984, when he came looking for a flying assignment. There were not many pilots certified to fly DC3 airplanes, so he easily got his certification and a job at Air Kenya, and soon became a fixture around Wilson Airport.

      In 1986, Jim hired him as a pilot for the Flying Doctors Service and it soon became obvious that Benoit should be the chief pilot. A good-looking bachelor, elusive and pensive, he lived alone. His proclivity for married women had rumours circulating that he had left his mistress in Algiers in a hurry, but no one really knew about Benoit’s private life. As chief pilot he was good at his job, well organized, and a stickler for the rules. His penchant for detail was prodigious; he built a valuable database for the Flying Doctors Service, which listed the coordinates and details of thousands of landing strips that covered the whole of East Africa. He was an excellent flyer and commanded the respect of all pilots flying out of Wilson, not just pilots working for the Flying Doctors Service.

      I got on famously with Benoit. He considered me an ally who was genuinely concerned with implementing badly needed changes to the Flying Doctors Service. His caustic sense of humour had him mimicking the Québec “joual.” I was sure he viewed my flying exploits with suspicion, but since I was not one of his pilots, he was discreet enough to keep those thoughts to himself.

      Almost all Benoit’s pilots were young, enthusiastic, and romantic: Grégoire Tallot, also French, only twenty-five years old, good-looking and keen for any assignment, the more challenging the better; Trevor Jones, laid-back, a good pilot, always weighing the risk, erring on the side of caution; Ahmed Ali, a Somali, older, more experienced, with more hours in his logbook than the others, the brother of the famous fashion model Iman, although he remained quiet about that.

      On missions, the pilots were supported by nurses—the backbone of the Flying Doctors Service. They were supervised by Bettina Vadera, a young, attractive, blond German-born doctor, who was dedicated to her nurses, never demanding from them anything she was not prepared to take on herself. All the nurses were African, well trained, and capable. Among them were Rose, the oldest, a single mother, wise and competent; Judy, her inseparable friend, the supervisor in charge of training the new arrivals from nursing school; and Rebecca, whose quiet dignity, grace, and gentleness exemplified all that was noble about the vocation of nursing.

      The nurses supervised the twenty-four-hour emergency HF radio station housed at AMREF headquarters, a medical radio link that covered all of East Africa and served as a reliable backup for the army when their communication system failed. The Flying Doctors Service delivered medical services to many in East Africa who otherwise would never have seen a doctor or nurse in their lifetime.

      In spite of the cash-flow difficulties and the political intrigues typical of most volunteer-based organizations, the Flying Doctors Service was viewed as a first-class organization of vital importance to Kenya. Employees believed they served a higher cause, which nurtured heroic performances by both pilots and nurses that often went unnoticed by the outside world.

      On the hangar floor David Mutava, the chief mechanic, was in charge of the men; he was devoted to Jim Heather Hayes, having flown with him in years past. He would point a gnarled finger to his head, saying, “See this white hair? How do you think I got that? Flying with Jim.” David relished telling tales of Jim’s flying exploits. “He was an uncanny pilot, knew the plane’s capabilities, always pushing the envelope. He used to scare the shit out of me.”

      David served as mediator between the men and Colin’s wild ranting on the hangar floor. The men trusted David. He had the instincts of an older African—wisdom acquired from years of watching and adapting to the muzungu’s, white man’s, ways, without losing his natural instinct and cunning.

      David and his men gathered regularly for tea breaks. They drank a mixture of hot milk and tea, a leftover from English colonialism, in the lunch room, where the language was Swahili and corporate politics were viewed from the perspective of the hangar floor. The place was off limits to senior management, a custom even Colin observed.

      After lunch, men and supervisors would saunter out onto the ramp to lie under the wings of the Flying Doctors Service aircraft. Cool breezes blew across the open airfield as they watched the airline hostesses walk by on their way to the Air Kenya terminal two hangars east. There was much informal banter as well as hard work, and in this sense, life in the hangar was like living in a large family.

      In many respects the whole of Wilson Airport was similar. It was a close-knit community of flyers, charter operators, mechanics, electronics shops, and flight-training schools. The private companies were owned exclusively by white Kenyans or Asians. Black Africans served as employees, rarely rising to a level above that of mechanic. There was no animosity, no conscious reference to colour or class; that was the pecking order. The British had bequeathed a class system that was firmly entrenched on the airfield. It was just accepted.

      Most of the aviation companies teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Owners spent their days grappling with the lack of spare parts and chronic shortages of cash. It was a tight community in continuous crisis; everyone owed someone else a spare part, money, or a service of some kind. The reconciliation of accounts when an outfit went bust left a wave of recriminations and the licking of wounds.